All the World Needs a Jolt

“All the World Needs a Jolt,” Silvia Federici states in her book Caliban and the Witch, where she notes the evidence of a massive withdrawal of labor. She reflects that Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords and it was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle that could have led to a higher social inclusion (Federici).

Deep in the prison system in the 1970’s, Angela Davis was briefly allowed to be in the larger prison population after seclusion as a political prisoner for her associations with the Black Panther movement and the Civil Rights movement. Shortly after joining the general prison population, her fellow prisoners asked her about the meaning of communism, and she stated that what most American’s learn about communism, through the media and the government, tends to be exaggerated and false.

“Angela, what does ‘imperialism’ mean?” a prisoner shouted afterhours between cells. She shouted back, “It is when the ruling class of one country conquers the people of another in order to rob them of their land, their resources, and to exploit their labor,” and another prisoner retorted “You mean treating people in other countries the way Black people are treated here?”

In Angela Davis’ 1974 autobiography, she reflects on her life experiences and how she came to be such an icon during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama where racism flourished and brutalized black Americans, she was told that she was too young to walk with Martin Luther King Jr. during his marches for human dignity, so when she matured like other key activists in the late 1960’s she came to realize that though Dr. King was significant in the fight for civil rights, our society in crisis needed more than just an assimilation into a failing Capitalist agenda.

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown were three of the most significant female activists associated with the Black Panther movement to have written memoirs of their lives from childhood to activism. The racial injustice, the police brutality, and the sexist treatment of individuals throughout the American society in the 1960’s and 70’s is not as far back in the past as we would like it to be. Racism still exists, imperial ambition has dominant voices pushing America into callous war after war (Iraq, Libya, and next Iran), and the prison system in America is the sharpest example of how unhealthy our society still remains.

Angela Davis and Elaine Brown still work with prison reform activism. Assata Shakur still remains in exile in Cuba after escaping from a biased judicial process that did not adequately protect her rights while on trail. She retreated to Cuba, yet was able to share her story in her 1987 autobiography. She retorts, “Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our repression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like Attica, San Quentin, Bedford Hills, Leavenworth, and Sing-Sing” (Shakur). With the 13^th Amendment stripping prisoners of their rights, returning them to a slave mentality, the prison industry gets paid to keep people behind bars then releases them, and then arrests them again, rather than making significant social reforms.

The crisis we are in is beyond class, race, and gender; yet those on the margins of wealth, from various races, who are poor, who are unemployed and still women, are the first victims of injustice. Voices like Angela Davis, refuse to be victimized. In Alondra Nelson’s recently published Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, she discusses that just as the idea of communism was manipulated via media exaggeration and false propaganda, so had the messages of the Black Panther movement, which had been exaggerated and falsely propagated. In fact, the Black Panther Movement involved itself in many community-building projects.

As Elaine Brown points out that not only were the Panther’s daring and headstrong against police injustice and brutality, but there were “the hundreds of thousands of people, Black, Latino, Asian and White, who participated in or benefitted from the Black Panther free-food programs, free medical clinics, legal aid programs, prison programs, school and education programs, senior assistance, child abuse and battered women programs, homeless outreach, and Vietnam Veteran services.” The Black Panthers reached out to all communities, and did not just represent reckless protest. A public revision of their cause and purpose is occurring.

Angela Davis, who spoke several months ago at an Occupy Wall Street protest, noted in her maturation process in the 1960’s that she “saw the problems of Black people as part and within the context of a larger working class movement … The present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. In reference to Marx, the free development of each is the condition for free development of all” (Davis).         

Grace Lee Boggs, prominent in urban development programs to strengthen the social consciousness in Detroit, in her groundbreaking reflections written with her husband James Boggs in 1974, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, inspects with a fine critical eye the jolting ripple effects from last century that are still evolving from their spring today.  She takes a look at certain revolutions and sees how we can learn from them. She is skeptical of Communist revolutions and Marxism that lead astray from their social intent. The fundamental questions she asks: 

1) Can revolutionists continue to base their activities chiefly on Marx’s analysis?

2) Would workers in industrially more advanced countries prove themselves as much in need of a cultural transformation to develop political and social consciousness and responsibility as the Russian backward worker had in 1917?

3)  What transformations in people does an oppressed social group or potentially revolutionary social force have to undergo to become an effective force in building a new society?

4)  How to bestow on the people a mobilized transformation that does not lead to a stagnant bureaucracy?

5)  And is it ever possible to have such a fundamental paradigm shift with nonviolent means of awakening?

Bogg’s assessment continues as she draws from a metaphor Mao had used in the Chinese Revolution before he was a dictator, but when he was a revolutionary thinker. The idea was along the lines of the traditional braided fibrous fishing rope and how the indifferent neutral masses lay in the center. Either end of the rope represented the Right and Left extremities. In order for the masses, sitting in political apathy, to move, both sides of the political rope had to pull hard enough at the same time to lift up the middle. Once off of its slump, the rope will inevitably have to be dragged into activity.

Grace Lee Boggs, even Angela Davis, reminds us that people must struggle simultaneously against their own weaknesses and the external enemy. Every responsible member must ‘build the revolution as you fight’, and as James Boggs totes “It is a struggle between seeing men and women as subjects and seeing them as objects, between seeing men and women as social beings capable of fighting, working, and acting together to transform themselves and transform each other,” we must overcome being isolated individuals, bundles of appetites, neuroses and fantasies, as so many become manipulated and programmed (Boggs).

Once you awaken, get to the side of the rope you are akin to and keep pulling:  All The World Needs A Jolt!